


Ghost Imaging

by Storyshark2005



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 23:06:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14579595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storyshark2005/pseuds/Storyshark2005
Summary: “Gavin-” Richard Hendricks chews the plastic-capped marker and looks for all the world like a harbinger of the future yet to come, and a ghost of Christmas-past. Gavin’s heart stutters a little, and the phantom smell of ink fills his nostrils, sharp and alkaline.-Just a little one-shot I banged out about past and future loves.





	Ghost Imaging

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rillrill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/gifts).



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

>   
>    
>  _One of the most difficult things for us to accept is that there is no realm where there’s only happiness and there’s no suffering. This doesn’t mean that we should despair. Suffering can be transformed._
> 
> _-Thich Nhat Hanh_

 

***

 

_Things fall apart- the center cannot hold._

 

Gavin rubs the red beads between his thumb and forefinger, counts the inhales and the exhales, and hears the soft timbered voice of the ghosts of his past. He closes his eyes, _i_ _n, out, in-_ and sees a sweep of black hair and dark, intelligent eyes. Clean, rounded fingernails.

 

_In, out. Four. Five. Six. Things fall apart- the center cannot hold._

 

Gavin has always believed reality to be malleable-  something to be prodded, pushed, and pulled into place, arranged just so. Life was hooped in by a transparent curtain, invisible to all but the most brilliant and daring. Gavin Belson had never been afraid to reach his arm out, and _push._

 

He thinks now that he was wrong. That the ephemerality of youth and pleasure were simply the first beats of a downward sloping measure. That the falling out of things was, perhaps, of a vein closer to the Truth.

 

He thinks he must reconcile the Truth.

 

These Truths:

  

That Hooli had survived it’s birth, and Gavin and Peter had created it. Together.

That Hooli had lived, and Peter had not. Does not.

That Peter was gone, and the last thing he’d said to him was some stupid veiled intimidation tactic, and not _How did I lose you?_

 

_Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight._

 

He opens his eyes and reads the numbers like a prophecy, scrawled almost carelessly, over his own glossy features. He hears the broken glass under his slippered feet, and looks back over at the hungry, foolish youth before him. Studies the sharp line of his jaw and the pinched forehead over clear blue eyes. He thinks, briefly, that of course the laws of physics could change for Richard Hendricks. That this strange mix of naiveté and sheer brilliance, of conscientious self-loathing, and staggering hubris-

 

“So...” Richard bites at a cuticle, absently, then gestures marker-in-hand. “What are you, uh- think? Thinking?”

 

He sees Peter, all wild dark eyes in his mother’s garage, scraping his neat, squared all-capitalized letters over and over again in layers of slick ball-point pen. Smells the chain lubricant from Peter’s ersatz motorized bicycle in the corner, the one he’d cut into the frame to retro-fit a washing machine motor, and _This is it- Gavin, this is everything-_

 

“Gavin-” Richard Hendricks chews the plastic-capped marker and looks for all the world like a harbinger of the future yet to come, and a ghost of Christmas-past. Gavin’s heart stutters a little, and the phantom smell of ink fills his nostrils, sharp and alkaline.

 

He shakes his head until the smell disappears, melds into the isopropyl whiff of dry-erase marker.

 

“What is _that-_ is that number correct?”

 

“Yeah, it is.” Richard’s nails are bitten to the quick, and his hands rub together, not nervous- but _anticipatory_. He is devastatingly young and beautiful in this moment, and Gavin feels the atoms in the room shift at the push of Richard’s fingertips. The world has gone malleable again, like clay or molten steel, and he feels ageless, weightless.

 

“Welcome to the future, Gavin.” Richard’s teeth flash white, and he swears he feels the press of a forehead between his shoulder blades, and a low, stilting chuckle.

 

There’s a fire at his back and in his heart, and Gavin feels both a part of this world and a stranger to it, and thinks that he is never not in-between.

 

***

 

_“Why are you doing this?”_

 

“Peter, you don’t-”

 

“I understand _what_ you are doing. I simply wish to know _why-”_

 

“I can’t keep apologizing for your actions. Despite your _brilliance_ , Peter- our investors are running out of patience. And they will not tolerate a sudden reassignment of another third of our engineering team to this, this- _fantasy-_ ”

 

Peter doesn’t blink. His eyes are like coal.

 

“This isn’t a fantasy. This is the future of computing.”

 

Gavin wipes his hands down his face, fingers pressed to his tear ducts. “It’s not-” he pulls his hands down, calming the air. “You’ve tried, Peter. It’s not going to happen. You need to stop.”

 

There’s a weighty pause, and Peter says nothing.

 

“You know, Peter- and I... I don’t blame them. We signed a deal, and...you’re...you know. You’re not here. You’re never here with me anymore. There’s tremendous pressure from the investors, from our competitors, and I...I am sick of being alone up here.”

 

The California sky was a deep, earnest blue behind the glass walls of the office. Peter looks uncomfortable under his blazer, too hot despite the central air and insulated windows. The orange, green, and gold painted walls. The empty, over-stuffed chairs.

 

Gavin thinks of Peter in a white t-shirt in the garage. He remembers the taste of Zima that Peter’s mother used to keep stocked in the fridge, like carbonated scotch tape.

 

Peter shakes his head, nose curling in distaste, and something dangerously close to emotional distress.

 

“This company was supposed to be different.”

 

Gavin looks at him, miles across the bright green table. Shakes his head in wonder. “Peter, we are different, we’re changing the world here, c’mon...”

 

But Peter simply pulls his mouth sideways, in that painfully synthetic attempt at a smile, and shuffles out of the office.

 

Peter relinquishes his shares in a generous buyout, the board is happy, and Hooli stock climbs steadily upward after a brief dip following Peter’s departure.

 

Gavin takes up judo, meets a guru named Denpok, and takes his first guided trip to Tibet. He moves his pool back two feet, and fills out Peter’s half-finished patent application for a decentralized internet.

 

***

 

Richard fills a whiteboard full of code at the incubator, and another in Gavin’s living room. He spends two weeks worth of afternoons pacing around the sofa, in front of the fireplace, bouncing ideas off of Gavin.

 

Gavin ignores Hooli News updates, forces himself to limit his email checks to twice a day. He meditates, goes for long afternoon runs, and drinks protein-rich smoothies from the couch as Richard erases, sketches numbers into white space, and erases again.

 

Over quinoa and roasted tomatoes one evening, Richard’s mouth twists to the side.

 

“Hey, uh. So you’ve got the cars, and all the um, trappings, or whatever. So where is your trophy wife?” his eyebrows angle up, his head tilts to the side like a goddamn bird.

 

“Are you fucking serious?” Gavin swallows a bite of quinoa. Refills his wine glass, and gestures across the table. Richard nods, and pushes his empty glass forward.

 

“Yeah, I mean. I know why _I’m_ not with anybody-”

 

“You’re a neurotic mess. You couldn’t talk to a woman if your life depended on it.”

 

Richard flinches, but nods. “Well, yeah. But you’re like...not. You’re charming. You have game.”

 

“ _Game?_ Jesus, Richard.”

 

“It’s true. So where are your _bitches_ at?”

 

Gavin shame-stares Richard back into silent eating.

 

He sighs, runs his tongue over his front teeth. “Women tend to like me about as much as I can stand them. I stick with the home team, Richard.”

 

“Oh.” A beat of silence, before Richard breaths in a significant, wide-eyed, “ _Ooh-_ ”

 

***

 

He remembers the day he met Peter Gregory. Home-schooled, dressed like a fifty-year old man at age fifteen, and in possession of the most brilliant mind Gavin had ever seen. Gavin’s skateboarding buddy Stacey had introduced him, as “this neighbor of mine, he like computers, too.”

 

Peter stands awkwardly in the doorway to the garage, Gavin runs his hands over the circuit boards, spools of wire, soldering gun, and the open guts of a Macintosh 128k.

 

Gavin’s cotton t-shirt feels sticky, the sunscreen his mother had insisted he wear has started to seep into his eyes, burning. He breathes lightly, his hand stops before it can touch the Mac.

 

“Where did you get this?”

 

Peter clears his throat, rocks back onto his heels. His hands tap against his thighs, unsure where to rest.

 

“I was able to obtain this model from my mother’s office building. It was damaged after a power surge. I am attempting to repair it.”

 

“Where does your mom work?”

 

“IBM.”

 

“Whoa.”

 

Peter blushes. “She...does not work in computing, per se.”

 

“Oh. Secretary?”

 

“Janitorial.”

 

“Oh. Well, that’s cool. She can get you parts and stuff.”

 

Peter’s mouth quirks, briefly.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Um. Can you show me how you’re fixing it?”

 

Peter’s eyes flash, and he nods.

 

“Yes. I can.”

 

***

 

Peter Gregory is dead and everything is falling apart. Nucleus is too heavy for it’s own legs, and Gavin needs that compression algorithm, he _needs_ it and he needs to crush Richard Hendricks like the jumped-up shit-eating teenager his is. And then a wizened Judge swipes it from Gavin’s hands and lowers it into Richard’s stupid, guileless lap.

 

But Karma works in mysterious ways, and Richard Hendricks is standing at his door not ten hours later. His white shirt rumpled, his tie unaccounted for.

 

Gavin’s fingers tighten, white-knuckled on the threshold, and he silently begins to count.

 

“What. The _fuck-”_

 

“They fired me. They just fucking-”

 

Gavin’s fingers itch to slam his 175lb solid mahogany door. But he knows he won’t get the satisfactory slam with the soft-close hydraulic hinges. He bites.

 

“What are you talking about? You just won the fucking Stanley Cup in court.”

 

“I don’t, uh- watch hockey, really- but, um-” Richard catches Gavin’s danger glare, and hurries along, over his own tongue. “The board, at Raviga- Laurie Bream just voted me out as CEO. They called this black-ops, fucking secret meeting-”

 

“There’s probably an email. Tagged and sitting in your Spam box.”

  
“What?” Richard’s caught off guard, jacket shrugged around stooped shoulders.

 

“It’s what you do when you’re trying to avoid a scene. Laurie Bream knew she had the votes, so there wasn’t any need to actually call you in. She had one of her little assistants write up an email, tag on a script, and it goes right to the Spam box. It’s plausible deniability.”

 

Richard’s face is somewhere between Step 2 and 3 of the 12 Stages of Grief, and it’s something Gavin’s seen all too many times.

 

“You’re not gonna help me, right? I mean, I didn’t think- but I thought maybe since you’d been, maybe you’ve been in my position, back when you started Hooli-”

 

“Richard. Fuck you.”

 

“Right, yeah. Fuck you too, I guess.” he mumbles off, bites his lip, and and Gavin’s eyes drop to the peek of red hanging from his jacket pocket.

 

“Why is your tie in your pocket?”

 

“What? Oh, uh-” Richard fumbles into his pocket, pulls it out in a handful. “I dunno, I was at Raviga and it was too tight in that stupid office- when they were- they took me- they took it from me.”

 

The sight is so pathetic, and it becomes difficult for Gavin to believe that this fumbling mess of a man has seemingly squatted down, pants around his ankles, and _shat out_ the next paradigm shift in modern tech, and this seems so monumentally unfair.

 

Gavin swallows, and continues counting silently. _Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen._

 

“Richard. I swear to God. If you’re not off  _my fucking porch_ in the next ten seconds _-”_

 

Richard isn’t as stupid as he looks (of course he isn’t, he’s _brilliant_ ) and he manages not to trip face first scrambling down the stone steps, past the Gehry fountain, and out into the dark street.

 

Gavin bends to pick up the forgotten tie. It’s cheap, polyester. Peter used to buy cheap shit ties like this, back before they were making money, before they both had their own personal shoppers.

 

He runs a thumb over the rough material, and later tucks it into his sock drawer.

 

He doesn’t sleep well for another two weeks.

 

***

 

Gavin position his legs into Lotus, straightens his spine, and breathes _in-_

 

He feels the pressure from his upper back lift, then fall deep down to his spine, connecting to the floor. Tension seeps from his leg muscles. His shoulders spread and his chest opens wide, up, _up-_ and his mind begins to fall backwards into a pleasant still, nothingness.

 

He breathes _out._ And he remains, hanging in time.

 

“Gavin.”

 

He is jolted from this pleasant suspension- back into the present. Palo-Alto is fading to a purple dusky tone from behind the tall glass windows of his office, and his fists clench white.

 

“Gavin.”

 

He takes another breath, tries to remember what Denpok said over lunch at _Hiroshi_. Something about conquering _anger by non-anger._ His fingers are pulled of their own accord to the red, wooden beads at his wrist. A gift from Peter, on his 30th birthday.

 

Two months later, Peter had turned in his parking tag and badge. Gavin still doesn’t know if the beads were meant in earnest, or as an elaborately deceptive _Fuck You_ , as only Peter was capable of pulling off. No one ever got Peter’s humor, except Gavin. And even then, his ability to discern the pith only reached to a sort of staircase wit- the austere sharpness of Peter’s humor almost always caught Gavin an hour late, his key halfway into the lock.

 

Still, Gavin hasn’t taken the bracelet off since, a year on now.

 

He finally turns, looks up at the nervous posture of his assistant, Jaime. Jeremy. Jimmy. Something like that.

 

“Yes.” He keeps his reply clipped.

 

“Your mother is on the phone. She says it’s an urgent matter.”

 

His mother tells him Leslie Gregory has died, complications due to breast cancer.

 

Gavin sits at his desk in the dark, his hand on the phone. He realizes that the only number he knows by heart is the one of Peter’s childhood home, the house that Leslie Gregory has until recently, lived in alone. He thinks Peter is probably there, or maybe at the hospital. His finger taps on the black plastic, and he tries to think of what he would say, if he were to gather the requisite courage, to call Peter, and tell him how sorry he was.

 

About everything, really.

 

He doesn’t call, of course. Months later Peter sells the house for the lot, and Gavin has a realtor broker the deal to cut off and relocate the garage. The landline is cut, but almost two decades away, it’s the only phone number he dares to keep stored away, in a filing cabinet just to the back and left of his heart.

 

***

 

Gavin comes back from Tibet and Richard is saved by a messianic server named Anton and 30,000 smartfridges.

 

They’re standing in Gavin’s evening-dim kitchen (the power is still off, he hadn’t even reached the breaker box before Richard was pounding on his door) and Gavin studies the purpled skin haloed around Richard’s eye, both of which were bloodshot. His face is devoid of color, its usual fairness dulled down to a pallor.

 

“You left. And everything fell apart.”

 

“You survived, Richard.”

 

“Right when we- right after you said we could _be_ _something-_ ”

 

“You figured it out, you didn’t need-”

 

“ _I-NEEDED- you_. You fucking- you fucking prick .” Richard pulls at his hair, his voice is shaken, and Gavin’s seen and experienced enough sleep deprivation to know, give or take ten hours, how long it’s been since Richard has slept.

 

“Everyone _hated_ me, _I hated_ me- and nothing was working, everything was falling apart, everything we’d built- and you with your goddamned _soul-searching-_ it was- I felt like-”

 

“Like you were drowning. Powerless, and totally alone. Like everything was being taken from you, and there was nothing you could do about it. And the unfairness of it all.”

 

Richard’s fingertips dig into the granite island, his head tips up.

 

“You could have helped. You could have stayed.”

 

“I had to go. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

 

“I am the only one who possibly might have.”

 

Gavin scoffs, laughs humorlessly. “Jesus, you’re so fucking young. You have no idea. You don’t know what it’s like to lose something, you haven’t built anything yet.”

 

Richard circles the island, pushes himself into Gavin’s space. “Fuck you, you know what we have. You know what’s coming. Pied Piper will make _everything_ you’ve built- _everything_ you’ve worked for, totally obsolete. You’re afraid, Gavin.”

 

Richard’s voice is unusually steely, steady and determined. Gavin reaches up to touch the pad of his index finger to his battered skin. Richard flinches, a hiss of air through his nose. He brushes his fingers over Richard’s ear, and down to the rigid set of his shoulder. Gavin hears his breathing pick up, and then Richard’s temple is at his cheekbone. He pulls him into his arms, one hand rubbing across his cotton hooded sweatshirt, another in the curls at the back of his head.

 

Richard’s blunted nails press into his shoulder blades, and something twists low in his gut.

 

“You need a haircut.” he whispers. Something clicks, and he hears a beep from the oven, a low hum from the refrigerator. The solar backup battery.

 

“You need to grow yours back.” Richard murmurs into his neck.

 

Gavin doesn’t apologize for leaving, and Richard doesn’t ask him to come back to Pied Piper. Gavin closes his eyes, breathes in the scent of cheap shampoo, and tries to keep still, keep right in the middle, between then, and there.

 

_One. Two. Three._

 

_***_


End file.
